There would be no true motion pictures, however, until live action could be photographed simultaneously as it occurred. This required a reduction in exposure time from the hour or so necessary for the pioneer photographic processes to the one-hundredth (and, ultimately, one-thousandth) of a second achieved in 1870; and the development of the technology of "series photography" (a moving picture camera).

In 1802 Thomas Wedgwood, son of the famous potter Josiah Wedgwood, reported his experiments in recording images on paper or leather sensitized with silver nitrate. He could record silhouettes of objects placed on the paper, but was unable to make them permanent and failed to record a camera image. Nonetheless, the paper on Wedgwood's experiments published by Sir Humphrey Davy in the Journal of the Royal Institution, London, in June 1802, is the first account of an attempt to produce photographs.

 
Joseph Nicephore Niepce, an amateur inventor living near Chalon-sur-Saone in France, came to photography through his interest in lithography; copying drawings by hand onto lithographic stone. He devised a method by which light drew the pictures. He oiled an engraving to make it transparent, then placed it on a plate coated with a light-sensitive solution and exposed the setup to sunlight.

After a few hours the solution under the light areas of the engraving hardened, while that under the dark areas remained soft and could be washed away, leaving a permanent, accurate copy of the engraving. He succeeded, from 1822, in copying oiled engravings onto lithographic stone, glass, and zinc and from 1826 onto pewter plates. In 1826/27, using a pewter plate in a camera obscura, Niepce produced the first successful photograph from nature, an eight-hour exposure from an upper window of a view of the courtyard of his country estate.

Paper prints were the final aim of Niepce's heliographic (i.e., sun-drawn) process, yet all his other attempts, whether made using a camera or engravings, were underexposed and too weak to be etched. Nevertheless, Niepce's discoveries showed the path that Daguerre and others were to follow.

Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre made his preliminary sketches by tracing the images produced by a camera obscura. About 1826 he began unsuccessful experiments in recording the camera image "by the spontaneous action of light." Learning of Niepce's work, he wrote to him, and in 1829 the two men formed a partnership to improve Niepce's invention. Daguerre used the improved materials Niepce had adopted--silvered copper plates and iodine--without achieving any improved results until 1835, two years after the death of his partner. By accident Daguerre discovered that a latent image forms on a plate of iodized silver and can be "developed" and made visible by exposure to mercury vapour. Exposure times could be reduced from eight hours to 30 minutes. The results were not permanent, but by 1837 Daguerre was able to fix the image permanently by using a solution of table salt to dissolve the unexposed silver iodide. That year he produced a photograph of his studio, remarkable for its fidelity and detail, on a silvered copper plate. Daguerre called the improved process after himself: daguerreotype.

In 1839 Daguerre and Niepce's son sold full rights to the daguerreotype and the heliograph to the French government, in return for annuities for life. Daguerre wrote a booklet describing the process, An Historical and Descriptive Account of the Various Processes of the Daguerreotype and the Diorama, which at once became a best-seller.

Unaware of the work of Wedgwood and the French pioneers, William Henry Fox Talbot, trained as a scientist at Cambridge University, was led to invent a photographic process because of his inability to draw landscapes. On a holiday trip to Italy in 1833, he had the idea of recording by chemical means the images in his camera obscura. By 1835 he had a workable technique: he made paper light-sensitive by soaking it alternately in solutions of common salt (sodium chloride) and silver nitrate. Silver chloride was thus produced in the fibres of the paper. On exposure to light the silver chloride became finely divided silver, dark in tone. Theoretically, the resulting negative could be used to make any number of positives simply by putting fresh sensitized paper in contact with the negative and exposing it to light. Talbot's method of fixing the print was inadequate, however, and the process was not successful until February 1839, when Herschel suggested fixing the negatives with sodium hyposulphite and waxing them before printing, which reduced the grain of the paper.